You Probably Shouldn’t Drop out of College

Especially if you want to be an electrical engineer.

When I meet new people, especially in a professional context, they often ask me about how I got to where I am. Because I’m fairly young, and fairly far along in my chip design career, I think they assume I’m going to tell them some wild story. That I was a child prodigy who was mentored directly by Paul Horowitz. Or that I dropped out, taught myself everything from a handful of textbooks, and then immediately started working on the Tesla Dojo. None of these things are true.

They seem a little dismayed when I tell the truth: I was a normal kid in high school. I went to college, and got both an undergrad and masters degree in electrical engineering. I wasn’t self-taught; I learned from going to class and doing problem sets like a normal student. My first job out of college was at a mid-stage startup doing AI chip design. I quit that job to start a hardware security startup, which built state-of-the-art chips for a small market. That startup got bought, for a modest amount. But now I know how to build zero-to-one chip teams at startups; it’s a useful and unique skill, which helped me land my current job.

Another thing people ask me, especially young folks who want to found companies one day, is whether they should drop out of college. If you’re young, smart, and ambitious, you probably want to get right to building your great idea rather than spending more time learning stuff. Plus, so many successful startups were founded by dropouts!

But if you want to found a deeply technical startup, especially in hardware, and especially in chip design, you probably shouldn’t drop out of college.

In deep tech, technical skills matter a lot.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but if you’re founding a very technical company, technical skills matter quite a bit. Maybe if you’re the CEO and you have a super technical CTO, you can avoid this, but most deep tech startups really do need technical founders. At my previous startup, all three of us were technical, with backgrounds in electrical engineering, applied math, and applied physics, respectively.

Unlike in the world of software, the technical skills you often need are hard to self-teach from a book. In electrical engineering, if you want to successfully design chips, you need to be able to use physical design software. This software is what allows you to map a logical chip architecture to the physical layouts that get sent to the factory to be manufactured. To access that software, you need to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in license fees. Or, you can take a class in school and get access to those tools for free, along with expert instruction on how to use them.

This is also true for mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering. Designing real hardware requires experience with software and equipment that you can’t self-teach in the same way you can with software. School provides a way to not only access that equipment, but also to get trained to use it like a professional should.

I designed my first chips in graduate school. If I didn’t have that knowledge, I’d never have been able to start a chip company and successfully deliver test silicon. Ultimately, technical skills are incredibly important to actually execute on any technical startup. But degrees and technical skills are also valuable when it comes to fundraising for technical startups and selling technical products.

VCs and customers do care.

There’s a reason why so many semiconductor companies are started by highly senior folks with tons of experience. SambaNova was founded by two professors and a successful silicon executive from Oracle. Cerebras was founded by the same guys who founded SeaMicro, a startup which sold to AMD for $334M. Groq and MatX were both founded by guys who worked on Google’s TPU. Because building chips is difficult and expensive, and requires so much specialized knowledge and experience, investors want to invest in founders who know what they’re doing. And a degree with relevant work experience is a great way to signal to investors that you do know what you’re doing.

When we raised our first round of funding, my co-founders, who were a year younger than me, were a few months from finishing school. Our lead investor, Root Ventures,¹ encouraged them to stay and finish their degrees rather than drop out. I think this was a really smart strategic decision -- given the technical complexity of what we were building, having completed degrees from top universities would help convince later investors and customers that we knew what we were doing.

It turns out that they were right. Later down the line, as we raised additional capital, the cachet of our degrees and the accomplishments we achieved in school, whether that was publications or successful chips, helped us keep the company going. Even still, though, our relative youth made sales difficult, especially in the security space. I can’t imagine how much harder it would have been if we were young dropouts.

Your startup probably won’t be your whole life.

Some founders start a company and end up working on that one company their whole life. Zuckerberg is still the CEO of Meta 20 years into the company, and I don’t expect him to leave for decades to come. But that’s not how most startups go! Your company may fail, or it may get acquired, or you may simply move on to the next thing. It’s hard to find concrete data, but the average lifespan of a startup is somewhere between 2 and 5 years; in the grand scheme of things, that’s a small portion of your life.

Especially if your startup isn’t a huge success, and you either fail or get a modest exit, you probably will still need to have a job. And most jobs, especially in electrical engineering and similar deep-tech fields, care about your degree. Even as an ex-founder with a modest exit under my belt, the fact that I have a masters degree in my field of expertise absolutely helped me land some job offers I wouldn’t have landed otherwise.

Ultimately, if you want to design chips, you probably shouldn’t drop out of college. Even if you have a great startup idea, the skills you learn in school and the credibility a degree lends you are worth the time you spend getting them. And if your startup doesn’t work out, having a degree prepares you well to enter a chip design field that places a lot of emphasis on formal training and specialized technical knowledge. Sadly, we can’t all be Zuckerberg or Gates.

1. Root Ventures are awesome, and if you’re building any deep tech company, they’d be my top choice as an investor.